China has never and won’t use a currency war to seek advantage in trade or to raise competitiveness in trade.

We have no intention of fighting a currency war. From a long-term perspective this is not beneficial to China.

This echoes the words of president Xi Jinping in Davos last month, when he warned that “no one will emerge as a winner from a trade war” and pledged that China would not seek to benefit from devaluation of its currency or a “currency war”.

The fresh comments follow an outburst from president Trump earlier this week in which he stated:

You look at what China’s doing, you look at what Japan has done over the years, they played the money market, they played the devaluation market and we sit there like a bunch of dummies.